In June 2024, three men walked away from some of the most prestigious institutions in technology—OpenAI and Apple—and launched a company with no product, no revenue, and no roadmap to commercialize anything, ever.

Those three men—Ilya Sutskever (former OpenAI chief scientist), Daniel Gross (former head of Apple AI and Y Combinator partner), and Daniel Levy (former OpenAI researcher and investor)—are the founders of Safe Superintelligence Inc.

One year later, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is valued at over $30 billion, and raised $2 Billion in its last funding round.

In April 2025, Google Cloud announced a partnership to provide TPUs for SSI's research.

In the first half of 2025, Meta attempted to acquire SSI but was rebuffed by Sutskever.

It employs fewer people than an average neighborhood café. It has published no research papers. It offers no demos, APIs, or even software libraries. It is, by all conventional definitions of a tech startup, vapor. And yet, its valuation and cultural gravity may be the most consequential signal in the history of artificial intelligence.

This is not a bubble. It is something far stranger: a bet on an idea so powerful, so transformative, that the only rational response is to fund it as though it already exists. SSI is the first company to convert a philosophical commitment—safe superintelligence—into a capital magnet of planetary scale. That fact should both inspire and terrify us.

The End of the Product Era?

The notion that a company can be valued in the tens of billions without any product is unprecedented even by Silicon Valley’s distorted standards. Facebook, Google, and Amazon were already generating significant traction before they raised comparable sums. Even OpenAI, often cited for its unconventional path, had released GPT models and API access long before it became a household name.

But SSI’s business model is no business model. Its promise is metaphysical: to give birth to a superintelligence and to raise it with the care and foresight we reserve for nuclear reactors or planetary defense systems. To some, this is visionary discipline. To others, it’s techno-messianic hubris. Either way, it is attracting unimaginable capital.

What we are witnessing may be the beginning of post-product capitalism: a mode of investment where the thing being sold is not technology, but proximity to existential power.

With AI now capable of generating full applications in seconds, it's no longer design or development that will drive a product's success—but the strength of its network and distribution.

Faith in the Invisible

The most unsettling part of SSI is not its lack of revenue. It’s the deliberate choice to remain secretive, —like a modern-day Manhattan Project without the war. The company’s sparse website reads more like a philosophical manifesto than a pitch deck. And yet it has managed to attract the most sought-after investors, the most exclusive hardware partnerships, and the most talented minds in AI.

Why?

Because SSI may or may not be selling software. It is, however, selling the idea that superintelligence is coming, that someone will build it, and that whoever does, better get it right. To invest in SSI is to express faith not just in the past experience of its founders, but in the inevitability of a new kind of intelligence—one so powerful that its supervision becomes a moral obligation rather than a market opportunity.

In this context, SSI becomes less a company and more a covenant: a collective act of trust that the people behind it will shape the future responsibly, without succumbing to the temptations of profit or power. It is a new kind of institution, perhaps even a new kind of government.

What If They’re Right?

There is a paradox at the heart of SSI: if its mission succeeds, it may render every other company—and possibly every other form of governance—obsolete. Superintelligence is not just another product category; it is the final product, the one that builds all others. If safety is not built into it from the ground up, no amount of regulation or ethics panels will be able to contain what follows.

What happens if they fail? What happens if someone else, less scrupulous, gets there first?

This is not merely a race for technological superiority. It is a race for the future of agency itself. And SSI’s existence is a tacit admission that we are already too close to super intelligence to treat this as business as usual.

A Cautionary Oracle

Safe Superintelligence Inc. is either the most important company in history or the most audacious leap of faith Silicon Valley has ever attempted.

Its rise should provoke awe—but also unease. Because behind the clean mission statements and billion-dollar rounds lies a sobering truth: the power of product has weakened against the power of networking.

Tell us what you think SSI will be all about in the comment section